Qui Habitat: Mode 2 Tract: Analysis

February 23, 2012

Here is an analysis I did last year when trying to get my head around the tract for the first Sunday of Lent, which is one of the longest chants of the year: Analysis of Qui Habitat: Mode 2 Tract. (pdf)

All I did was try to mark off similar phrases/motifs with different colors/brackets. I was originally trying to stick to red= ends-on-do, orange=re, green=fa, but it eventually degenerated into random usage of yellow, brown and even pink. What I meant by the gray, I don’t know; they are kind of just the other bits that were un-accounted-for.

In the end, the useful thing to know is that all the mode 2 tracts use very much the same vocabulary of phrases. Thus this analysis can help one understand how the typical mode 2 tract that you meet on the streets is constructed.

Side note: this year we will doing this to a psalm tone, but last year we did really sing the whole thing (plus the gradual before it). Listen to a great recording of this here. (from http://renegoupil.org/)